Perspective: It's time for Florida lawmakers to end attack on courts

Note: The following editorial was published Wednesday by The Orlando Sentinel:

Politicians in Tallahassee mounted a sustained attack on Florida’s courts in 2011 and 2012. With state lawmakers now back in the Capitol for their 2013 session, it’s time for a truce.

In the past couple of years, lawmakers proposed splitting up the state Supreme Court and creating three new slots for Gov. Rick Scott to fill. They called for subjecting appointees for justice to Senate confirmation and making it easier for voters to unseat justices and appeals judges. They advocated giving the governor more control over the judicial nominating process.

Each of these bad ideas would have opened the courts to more pressure from politicians or popular opinion. In a healthy democracy, the courts are the one branch of government that must be insulated from those pressures. Judges must rule based on the law, not politics.

Fortunately, each idea was stymied, either by majorities in the Legislature or in the electorate. Last year voters also rejected an unprecedented political campaign from the Republican Party of Florida to defeat three high court justices up for retention.

We expected better from this year’s Legislature, considering the leadership’s shift in emphasis from ideology to good government.

Yet, another assault is brewing. Last month a House committee endorsed another bid to hand the governor more power over the process of appointing judges and justices.

Under the current system, governors fill court vacancies by choosing from lists of nominees whose qualifications are vetted by commissions. These nine-member panels are appointed by the governor, though he picks four members from a list submitted by the Florida Bar, the state lawyers’ organization. The system was better balanced between the governor and the Bar when Gov. Reubin Askew designed it in 1971, but lawmakers tilted the scales in the chief executive’s direction in 2001.

The House committee bill would further degrade the system by allowing governors to replace any of his commission appointments at will. This would create a new lever for governors to pressure commissioners to produce a list of nominees based on political connections instead of legal qualifications.

If anything, lawmakers should move in the other direction, and restore the balance on the commissions that Askew intended.

Florida courts have become a target in Tallahassee by daring to stand up to the governor and the Legislature. They’ve struck down laws they found unconstitutional and removed from the ballot legislators’ proposals that they deemed misleading.

Their rulings certainly aren’t infallible, but this is what independent courts do — serve as a check on the power of the other two branches of government. If lawmakers weaken that role for Florida’s judiciary, the state’s democracy will suffer for it.

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